STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Attorney General Pam Bondi says she's ending what she called the weaponization of the Justice Department during the Biden administration. What is the case that she's weaponizing it herself? NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas looked into some of the early acts of the Trump Justice Department.
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: At her confirmation hearing in January, Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed to fight violent crime and to restore confidence and integrity to the Justice Department.
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PAM BONDI: The partisanship, the weaponization, will be gone. America will have one tier of justice for all.
LUCAS: Like President Trump, Bondi argues that the department was politicized under the Biden administration to target Trump and conservatives more broadly, and they point to the prosecutions of Trump himself as prime examples. John Lauro, who served as Trump's defense attorney in some of those cases, says Bondi is tackling weaponization head-on. Here's Lauro speaking at a recent event with the conservative Federalist Society.
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JOHN LAURO: So we now see no political prosecutions, no sham indictments, no fake grand jury proceedings, but instead a way of looking at the Department of Justice in terms of restoration and ensuring that the rule of law will be carried out going forward.
LUCAS: Liz Oyer is the former pardon attorney at the Justice Department.
LIZ OYER: I think what's happening in the Department of Justice right now is that it's being transformed into Donald Trump's personal law firm.
LUCAS: Oyer and other critics say that, in fact, Bondi is taking actions to politicize the department herself.
OYER: The attorney general has made it clear that directions are coming from the very top - from the president - and she is there to do his bidding. That means pursuing enemies of the president. That means doing favors for friends of the president. The Department of Justice is essentially whatever the president wants it to be right now.
LUCAS: Oyer was fired in March after she declined to restore gun rights to the actor Mel Gibson, who is a prominent supporter of President Trump. Oyer says she had public safety concerns due to Gibson's domestic violence conviction. Ultimately, Bondi gave Gibson his gun rights back. But it's an example of concerns that Oyer has about what is driving decision-making for the new department leadership.
OYER: Career professionals, experts in their field, are being marginalized. And decisions are being driven by political considerations, uninformed by the knowledge and expertise of the career staff.
LUCAS: Bondi and her top lieutenants previously served as Trump's personal defense attorneys. Under their leadership, the department has fired prosecutors who worked Capitol riot cases or investigated Trump, pushed out senior officials at the FBI and dropped cases against the president's political allies. One example critics point to is the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. In that instance, the department leadership directed prosecutors to dismiss the Adams prosecution, suggesting that it interfered in the mayor's ability to help Trump with immigration enforcement. Nearly a dozen prosecutors resigned in protest. One of them was Ryan Crosswell. He worked in the public integrity section in Washington. After prosecutors in New York refused to drop the case, the then-acting deputy attorney general gave lawyers in Crosswell's office one hour to find two attorneys among them to sign the court papers dismissing the Adams case.
RYAN CROSSWELL: We felt we had three options, and I don't think I'm just speaking for myself. One was to resign en masse, two was to be fired, or three was that someone would sign the motion.
LUCAS: In the end, one attorney agreed to sign it, Crosswell says, to save the Public Integrity Section and its mission - prosecuting corruption, including criminal conflicts of interest and people that profit from their government positions.
CROSSWELL: I think that losing the Public Integrity Section would be devastating because the work's so important. It's been serving the public for nearly 50 years.
LUCAS: Days later, Crosswell resigned. He had been a federal prosecutor for around a decade. He disputes that the department ever was weaponized, and he finds the current leadership's talk of ending it ironic.
CROSSWELL: And even if you did think that it was weaponized, then the correction to weaponizing the department is not to do it yourself.
LUCAS: Certainly, enforcement and policy priorities shift from administration to administration. What's going on now, Crosswell says, is something altogether very different.
Ryan Lucas, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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